The Social Contract - 12zy
---Chapter viii : The People---
Peoples, like men, are amenable易服从的 only when they are young;
in old age they become incorrigible /ɪn'kɒrɪdʒɪb(ə)l/ 无法矫正的.
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Once customs are established
and prejudices ingrained难除掉的, it is a dangerous and
futile★无效的 enterprise to try to reform them;
Certain nations can be
disciplined when they are born, others cannot even after ten
centuries. The Russians will never have a true political order,
because they were given one too early.
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The genius of Peter the
Great was for imitation; he did not have true creative genius,
of the kind that makes something out of nothing无中生有.
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Some of the
things he did were good, but the majority were misplaced不合时宜的.
He realized that his nation was barbarous, but not that it was not
yet ready for political organization; he attempted to civilize it
when all that was needed was to train it for war.
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He wanted to
produce Germans and Englishmen immediately, when he
should have begun by producing Russians: by persuading his
subjects that they were something different from their real
selves, he prevented them from ever becoming what they could
have been.
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The Russian Empire will attempt to subjugate征服
Europe and will be subjugated itself. The Tartars鞑靼人, its subjects
or its neighbours, will become its masters and ours; it seems to
me inevitable that such a revolution will occur. All the kings of
Europe are working together that it may happen the sooner.
？？？
---Chapter ix : The Same Continued---
UST as nature has put limits to the size of a well-formed man,
and outside these limits produces only dwarfs侏儒 or giants,
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so too,when it is a question of the best constitution for a
state, there are limits to the size that it can have, in order
that it should neither be too large to be well governed, nor
too small to continue to exist on its own.
-★★
In every political body there is a
maximum strength which it cannot exceed, and which
it often loses by becoming larger.
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The further the social bond is stretched伸展, the
weaker it gets; and in general a small state is
proportionately stronger than a large one.
★★★
In the first place, administration is more difficult over large
distances, just as a weight becomes heavier at the end of a longer
bar, and it also becomes more onerous★繁重的 as the hierarchy of divisions
increases;
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each town, to start with, has its administration, paid
for by the inhabitants; each district too has its own, also paid for
by the inhabitants; then each province; then the greater administrative
areas, the cost of which increases from one level to the next, but
still at the expense of the unhappy inhabitants;
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finally comes the
supreme administration that crushes everything underneath. All these
added burdens are a continual drain on the subjects' resources: far
from having a better administration at the different levels, they
are less well governed than if there were only one above them.
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There are scarcely any reserves left for emergencies,
and when it is necessary to resort to them the state is always
on the brink of ruin.
Not only is the government less swift反应快的 and
vigorous有精力的 in seeing that the laws are observed, in preventing
exactions苛捐杂税, redressing纠正 abuses, and forestalling预先阻止
the attempts at sedition暴动 that can arise in distant places,
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but the people has less affection感情 for its leaders, whom it
never sees, for its country,which it regards as the whole world,
and for its fellow-citizens,most of whom are strangers.
